Land Rover Discovery
2002 LAND ROVER DISCOVERY
The fi rst thing I did after passing my B+E trailer test was to buy an 8x4 Ifor Williams trailer. The fi rst thing my parents did was fi ll it full of stuff . Said belongings then had to be transported from Norfolk to the Outer Hebrides.
With the trailer approaching its 1.4-tonne limit, this was not a job for my Fiat Panda and my Land Rover Series IIA was at the wrong end of the country. The task was assigned to this Discovery 2, normally my mother’s runabout.
It did the same journey hauling a few years ago, but now its brakes needed attention. Neither rear calliper was working – common with Discoverys as mud clogs the piston – and the front discs were warped, causing the brake pedal to throb when applied.
I began by detaching the rear callipers and carriers, and replacing the pads. Some of the pads were shot, the carrier pins on both rear wheels were seized, and the splash guard on one side was so rusty I was able to break it off with my fi ngers. New units had to be ordered, turning this into an expletive-inducing, multi-day task. Things weren’t so bad at the front, and swapping the discs and pads was simple.
But replacing the rear carriers wasn’t the end of the story, as the offside calliper had seized. No amount of pushing the piston in and out was going to free it off , and the disc remained rusty on test drives, indicating it wasn’t being scrubbed by its new pads, so a new calliper was ordered.
This was one of those simple jobs that becomes a lengthy saga, but I eventually felt confi dent enough to set off . The journey wasn’t plain sailing though, as I’ll report next time…